As a needle used for medical practice such as insulin intramuscular injection, a wing-like needle has been known, which is provided with a hollow needle, and a pair of wing pieces formed integrally with a holding cylinder for holding a rear end of the hollow needle. The holding cylinder and the wing-like needle are made of soft resins, for example plasticized polyvinyl chloride.
In the case of using the wing-like needle, a medical practitioner such as a doctor or a nurse first removes a protector capping the hollow needle, mutually coalesces and holds the pair of wing pieces made of the soft resins, and then sticks the hollow needle into a muscle of an abdomen or the like of a patient. Then, the practitioner opens the pair of wing pieces left and right of the holding cylinder, and fastens them to the abdomen or the like of the patient by adhesive tape, thereby securing the hollow needle during the intramuscular injection.
After the end of the intramuscular injection, the wing-like needle is removed from the body of the patient, and discarded. However, if the hollow needle is exposed in this case, the medical practitioner or a person who discards the needle may stick the hollow needle into his finger or the like by mistake (simply referred to as mistaken sticking, hereinafter). Here, if the patient suffers from infectious disease such as HIV or acute hepatitis, the medical practitioner or the person who discards the needle is in danger of being infected with the disease through the hollow needle.
Conventionally, therefore, in order to prevent the mistaken sticking, the used hollow needle has been capped again with the protector removed before the use (recapping). The conventional protector is a hollow cylindrical body, which has a length equivalent to that of the hollow needle. The recapping is carried out by bringing the protector and the hollow needle close to each other in an extended direction of the hollow needle, and inserting the hollow needle from its tip into an opening end of the protector.
However, the protector is disadvantageous in that as fingers holding the protector are positioned in a moving direction of the tip of the hollow needle, the tip of the hollow needle may be mistakenly stuck into the fingers during the recapping.